Trapped in time and place
THE GUEST BOOK by Sarah Blake (Viking, $37)
Sarah Blake mulls upon the manners and morals, privileges and prejudices of America’s aristocracy in this glamorous and galling new novel, following the lives of three generations of the Milton family.
Ogden and Kitty Milton buy an island off the coast of fashionable Maine in the 1930s, shortly after the tragic loss of their first-born son. Grief must remain hidden forever, behind bright smiles; the accident is never to be spoken of again. Born and bred to lead, in finest patriotic style, the mere concept of failure is forever denied by these fine, upstanding citizens.
The family continue to “summer” on the island, in full ritual — the lobster picnic, the bayberry boughs in the copper vase, the same shepherdess figurine in its exact spot on the mantel, dances in the grand barn — up to the present day.
Except their wealth and power has considerably declined in recent times and the grandchildren of Ogden and Kitty now face losing their private piece of paradise. Some of the cousins are happy enough to let it go but Evie clings with a fiery passion to the place she sees as her very heart and soul.
Blake quotes James Baldwin in a preface to the tale: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Evie definitely is. In the ensuing pages both subjects, people and history, are exposed as equally mutable and terrible, dark secrets emerging as the binding force.
Blake is a superb writer and nowhere more heartbreakingly poignant than in her description of the day Kitty’s baby dies. It is an event that will stay with the reader for weeks, maybe forever. Crockett Island is so poetically described that you virtually feel the sun on your face and the salty tang on your tongue. Her grasp of the culture of the times is stunningly complete.
But for all its panache, it is not the perfect novel. Much remains unsaid, especially on the inexcusable corruption that lies beneath the Miltons’ success and forms the foundation upon which their dynasty, for all its professed honour, is set. We seem to simply slide right on by.
At almost 500 pages the book is also overly long. We get Evie’s grief and despair long before Blake is done with it and have plenty of time to ponder whether the angst of one feminist historian’s grief at losing the family pile is actually all that meaningful? And we get to the conclusion, several hundred words before poor Evie, that in the end we all do just vanish. 6 7 8 9 10